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Scholars have often overlooked the role played by political and administrative authorities in effecting changes in the status and representation of men of letters at the end of the eighteenth century, the moment of “€œthe consecration of the writer”€ and a wholesale reorganization of the book market. An examination of the letters sent by those claiming to be writers or scientists and petitioning for support and pensions between 1780 and 1820 helps to highlight the terms and implications of the relationships between political authority (whether royal, revolutionary, or imperial) and the world of letters and science. The analysis of three moments (the reform of 1786, the recomposition that took place following Thermidor, and the imperial period) not only takes us beyond the models of royal and aristocratic patronage, but underlines the important role played by the state in the transformations which characterized the intellectual world between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.